Crowd Computing

The power of crowd always has brought wonders. The same applies to the computing as well. The accumulated idle CPU cycles of millions of personally owned devices are capable of producing huge computing capacity. We have termed it as crowd computing. Though this very concept has been nurtured in the past through grid computing, in the age of powerful smartphones and tablets, it deserves to have a fresh look. In this chapter, the authors aim to present crowd computing in a modern approach. Readers will be able to gain a fair comprehension of the various aspects of crowd computing and have an insight of the ecosystem of this computing paradigm. The characteristics, benefits, issues, implementational challenges, applications, and examples of crowd computing are portrayed elaborately. To clear the air, crowd computing has been distinguishably compared to other analogous computing systems such as P2P computing, cloud computing, supercomputing, and crowdsourcing. The business values of crowd computing as well as the scope of offering crowd computing as a service have also been explored.